Jon Robins traces the development of some of the smaller legal markets in the shadow of Liverpool and Manchester

The north-west as a legal region is a wildly disparate but largely buoyant market encompassing Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Lancashire and Cheshire. One compelling reason for the success of a certain type of legal practice is simple economics. The region, with its low overheads, has proved a magnet for volume legal work. ‘In London, you can be paying £36 a square foot [for office space] if you’re lucky, whereas we can get rent of £8 a square foot and overheads are substantially less, which means you can take on low-value work and still make the margins work in your favour,’ explains Andrew Leaitherland, managing partner of DWF, which is based in Liverpool and Manchester.


It is a formula that Southport practice Barnetts cottoned on to years ago. When the firm set up 25 years ago, it planned to have a generalist high street presence. However in the mid-90s, senior partner Richard Barnett re-invented it as a volume practice and now conveyancing (70%) and personal injury (25%) make up most of its work-load. What does location mean to the firm? ‘We’re based here, but that is as far as it goes, because the work we do is throughout England and Wales,’ he says. ‘The advantage for us being in the north-west is simple. You do not get firms like ours in the south-east, because they already have a handicap and that’s to do with cost base.’ The firm concentrates on volume work, which is why it has 300 staff but only 20 qualified solicitors. ‘A lot of what we do is almost an administrative function and does not require legal input, except at certain points in the transaction,’ explains Mr Barnett. ‘We have commoditised the whole process.’


After Manchester and Liverpool, Preston is a major legal centre. Local firm Ricksons now has offices in Manchester, Leeds and most recently London. It began as a niche insurance practice in 1974 and has sought to diversify into a mainstream commercial firm, and now has 260 staff with most people in Preston. How important is location? ‘We’re in Preston largely because of an historical accident – that is where the firm was founded,’ replies managing partner Anthony Hughes. ‘But we can cover the gap between Cumbria and the north-west from here.’ MWR Law, also based in Preston, was established more than 100 years ago to service trade union clients. It remains mainly a union firm, concentrating on personal injury and employment work. ‘Some of our union work is national, and some of it comes from the north-west, but isn’t local or from Preston,’ says client liaison partner Jane Booker (described on the firm’s Web site as ‘originally a southerner’). However, the firm has launched what she calls a ‘fairly aggressive’ advertising campaign for non-union claimant personal injury work, to fend off claims management companies. As far as the Preston legal market is concerned, she reckons that the fact that the town was granted city status by the Queen in 2002 as part of her Golden Jubilee celebrations is a help. But she says: ‘We are aware that from time to time, we have lost work simply because of where we’re based, and the fact that we are smaller than Manchester or Liverpool firms.’


Forbes has true coverage throughout the region with eight offices in Accrington, Blackburn, Chorley, Leeds, Manchester and Preston, staffed by some 130 fee-earners. The mainstay of its work is defendant insurance work, largely advising local authorities. ‘Most of the authorities we act for are based in the north, although not necessarily in the north-west,’ comments senior partner John Barker. The 100-year-old firm has grown organically, with only one small merger 15 years ago, though it has shaken off the last vestiges of the high street. Mr Barker says the separate legal markets of the region ‘tend to be self-sufficient’ and the legal work is centralised within his practice with, for example, employment work being handled by one office and wills, trusts and probate by another.


Over in Altrincham, Cheshire, commercial practice Neil Myerson is a very different type of firm. ‘We are an oddity,’ acknowledges managing partner Carl Newton. ‘Outside of Manchester, we are the largest niche, corporate/ commercial practice and every other firm like us is located in Manchester city centre.’ The firm has 21 lawyers, mainly recruited from commercial law firms, and targets owner-managed businesses with, Mr Newton claims, ‘turnovers of anything from typically £1 million to £100 million’. He adds: ‘Altrincham is good for us because we’re the closest commercial law firm to Manchester airport and so people can come in from abroad, but we are also close to the M56, so we can get in and out of the north-west very quickly.’ It also means the firm can tap in to many wealthy private clients in affluent Cheshire.


But the firm looks mainly towards Manchester for clients. Mr Newton says the presence of big national firms and the continuing consolidation of the market presents an opportunity. ‘Those firms are looking for plc volume work, which we aren’t interested in,’ claims Mr Newton. ‘The traditional market, which is the owner-manager sector, is not their main focus any more – and that’s where we’re scoring.’